updated 12:26 pm EDT, Wed October 30, 2013

iPad, iPad mini take 30 percent of tablets sold

Apple remains far and away the leader in overall tablet sales, according to new figures from industry analyst firm IHS. The company's iPad and iPad mini accounted for nearly 30 percent of the total worldwide tablet market, even though total iPad sales were down from the previous quarter. Apple's nearest competitor, as with the rest of the mobile segment, was Samsung, which held about 22 percent of the market.

The 14.25 million iPads Apple shipped in the last quarter accounted for 29.7 percent of total unit shipments. That is a sizable portion of the tablet market, but it represents a drop of 12.7 percentage points over the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, chief rival Samsung has grown its share position by 8.1 percentage points. Samsung took a 22.2 percent share of the tablet market in the third quarter, shipping 10.7 million units.

"The erosion in Apple's unit shipment market share was inevitable," said Rhoda Alexander, director, tablet research for IHS. "Cheaper almost always wins the volume race, and competitors were quick to adjust pricing when it became clear that it was impossible to achieve anything close to Apple's unit growth at the same price level. The resulting surge in sub-$250 alternatives catapulted Android to the leading operating system in tablets in the third quarter of 2012, but left vendors searching for profit in an increasingly competitive market."

Asus, maker of Google's Nexus 7 tablet and its own line of Android devices, took third place among tablet manufacturers, shipping 3.5 million devices in the quarter. Asus' Q3 total amounted to an 87 percent increase in shipments from the previous quarter.

Likewise, Lenovo made comparably sizable gains in the quarter, shipping 2.3 million units. That amounted to a 94.6 percent increase over its Q2 total. In fifth place was Acer, which shipped just 903,000 units in the quarter.

Surface RT is clearly "a part of this market (& thusly indiscernible)."

The Surface Pro is a hybrid convertible/ultrabook that MS (unfortunately) spent hundreds of millions of dollars marketing as a tablet rather as a convertible/ultrabook. MS got horrible sales in spite of huge ad/PR expenditurespositioning the 2-pound Surface as a tablet.

Today perhaps "Microsoft wishes" to try to recover its lost brand imagery by more appropriately marketing the Surface 2 as a hybrid convertible/ultrabook like they should have with last year's 7 months of vaporware marketing.